I convinced myself that this year’s Oscars was going to be packed with surprises. The long lead up through precursor awards was uncommonly chaotic, spreading the trophies across multiple different acting honorees rather than locking in on a set of consensus winners. There was all sorts of chatter about a vibe shift away from longtime presumptive frontrunner One Battle After Another to Sinners. That made sense to me. Sinners was the most-nominated film after all, not just of this year but any year. Add in the scuttlebutt about how Academy members were guiltily adhering to the new rule mandating they watch every film that factored into a category before they voted in it and it suddenly felt like Oscars could be dispatched in wild, unpredictable ways.

When the gold dust settled, the 98th Academy Awards ceremony was actually fairly predictable. The four acting winners exactly mirrored the recent recipients of the Actor awards presented by the Screen Actors Guild, Paul Thomas Anderson got his long-awaited due from the Academy, and just about everything else fell in line. Cars that go vroom delivered a Best Sound win, and the most accessible movie claimed Best International Film. Much as I’ve lamented the Oscars moving in lockstep with expectations in this past, last night felt like an institution asserting its sturdiness. There was a satisfaction is seeing this set of winners take the stage. Even if they weren’t always my personal picks, they were the kind of winners who will bear up to the scrutiny of retrospection. When Hamnet plays as part TCM’s month of Oscar winners three decades from now, anyone watching will surely think, ‘Well, of course Jessie Buckley won Best Actress for this.’

It also feels apt that One Battle After Another and Sinners wound up relatively close to one another in the statuette tally for the night, the former with six wins and the latter earning four. Sinners probably got the right four, too. The film’s wins certainly accounted for some of the most electrifying portions of the night, notably Michael B. Jordan taking Best Actor and Autumn Durald Arkapaw delivering a speech that met the moment of her making history as the first women to prevail in the cinematography category.

I strongly believe these moments have the excitement they do because the Oscars are currently being guided by people who genuinely appreciate the import of the ceremony they guide. After years of producers who almost treated the awards themselves as a nuisance that got into the way of heaping empty spectacle on the stage, the ceremony is being guided by people who care about the Oscars as much as those who, like me, watch them with devotion. That appreciation for the value of the awards show itself extends all the way up to Conan O’Brien, who is already settling into the mode of comfort and steadiness that suggests he should hold the host role for as long as he cares to. As the Oscars charge towards their centennial, they are in good hands.